Here's to you, pretentious, low grade-giving TA.

What a comfort to know that there's someone like you, bitter low grade giving pretentious TA, to help us along on the path to philosophical, or scientific, or psychological, theological, literary, or mathematical enlightenment.

You have all the best personal qualities of a high school substitute teacher, my best friend's annoying older siblings, and the aunt who's always trying to wipe stuff off my face with her spit covered finger. You are academia's hormonal adolescent, and you know if you had only been born fifty years earlier you would have thought of all this stuff that everyone else already did. Here's to your fashion sense that reflects both a charming frugality and detachment from reality. Here's to your love life, or, well, lack thereof, to your brooding, and to your simultaneous inferiority and superiority complexes.

Bitter low grade giving pretentious TA, you say, "I will be here for 11 more years if I'm lucky, still trying to get to the bottom of this thingtheory that no one cares about and that I realized nine days ago, neither do I. I am doing this because I was that kid as an undergraduate who just never quite got into the social swing of college but had a hopeless and enormous crush on every professor, of either sex, that I ever had. You legacy, lethargic, spoiled, shallow, stupid excuse for anything resembling intelligent.

"While I am still working on my thingtheory, you, you snot nosed, binge drinking freak, will have spent a few years doing volunteer work in a South American orphanage, will have been promoted in Wonderfulco, Incorporated, to senior vice president, popped out three or four kids and finally settled in Fabulousville with Mr. Perfectandcoolineveryway. I will have spent approximately seven hundred million hours researching this thingtheory no one cares about, and will have come to the conclusion that no one cares about it.

Meanwhile, all my connections to anything resembling reality will have faded away into the night, leaving me in a cold, sterile, emotionless bubble. I will still be bitter, and I still will not have an office. I will never get a real job and I will never learn English. I am holding all the cards in this relationship, and, yeah, it's a power trip. Don't step to my green pen, I will cross out your entire paper. Go ahead, try me. I can tell if you wrote this last night. I need therapy but I can't even afford to eat anything but Ramen."

"Don't you know the Nietche-Hemingway-Plato-Darwininial theorum? Don't you know ANYTHING? Ah, perhaps I should explain this in terms you can understand, but Dr. Seuss didn't get around to writing any books about Calculus. Haven't you read Finnegan's Wake in its Swahili translation? It's the only way to really get the intricate nuances of it. The historical turmoil of that atomic despotic erotic demonic government clearly ended the Rennassaince and formed the basis for the Freudian interpretation of Communism. And, you see, it was of course the manifest existential political stream of consciousness heat transfer integrations that produced the feminist theory of reciprocity. God does not exist, and I'm not sure about deodorant. Duh, ya dummie."

"And your paper sucks."

• Yay for T.A.'s